NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has discovered evidence of ancient volcanoes on the surface of the Red Planet. They are believed to have erupted under a sheet of ice, despite the fact that they were discovered around 1,000 miles (1,609 km) away from the vast southern Martian ice cap.Read More
A team of researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has released a paper outlining the probability for each of the three leading theories explaining how the phantom "Planet Nine" could have ended up in its current theorized orbit.Read More
NASA and its partners are in the process of developing two cutting-edge technologies with the potential to significantly advance the hunt for extraterrestrial life on distant Earth-like planets. The ambitious designs currently under development could allow astronomers to cut through the intense disturbance caused by an exoplanet's parent star, allowing them to image the remote worlds directly, and make detailed observations.Read More
Do you have 37 seconds of time to spare today? If so, you can zip towards the very center of our galaxy thanks to a new video put out by the Hubble Space Telescope team. The video is really just a long zoom into an image released last month, but it definitely provides the sensation of heading through our galactic core to the black hole that lies at its center.Read More
The sea urchin may be a restaurant delicacy, but it's also well equipped to satisfy its own appetite. The spiny invertebrate has a rock-crushing mouth so powerful that a herd of them can destroy a kelp forest or devastate a coral reef. Now its dinner manglers have inspired a team of engineers and marine biologists at the University of California, San Diego, to create a claw-like manipulator for robotic rovers tasked with collecting soil samples on other planets.Read More
Exomars 2018 is now ExoMars 2020 after the Euro-Russian Mars landing mission was officially postponed for two years. The joint ESA/Roscosmos venture has been beset by delays over the past four years and recent setbacks in mission preparations have placed the 2018 launch window out of reach, prompting the rescheduling.
Using a telescope especially designed to hunt exoplanets, a team of astronomers working at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have discovered three planets orbiting a dwarf sun, just 40 light-years from Earth. According to the researchers, all three worlds are potentially habitable given their sizes and temperatures, and may be the best possibilities yet in the search for life beyond our solar system.
Elon Musk isn't usually one to understate his products' capabilities, but it seems the SpaceX team was a bit conservative with its payload predictions for the Falcon spacecraft. Updates published online have revealed the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy will be able to carry much more than we first thought into low-earth orbit.Read More
Deep space exploration has taken one small step (or roll) forward with the successful test of space-based control of a robot rover from aboard the International Space Station. The experiment saw British ESA astronaut Tim Peake take control of a British-built rover named "Bridget" and guide it around a simulated Martian landscape back on Earth, avoiding obstacles and locating scientific targets along the way.Read More
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